I got a really good response from yesterday’s OTP. Maybe better than I’ve ever gotten actually and so I kinda wanted to do it again today but I’m not sure that’s really a daily goal. That thing was aÂ confluenceÂ of me being really tired and needed a creative outlet so bad that I forced one into a format where one didn’t usually exist and me finding an article that was just so randomly bizarre that I wanted to write something long-form about it. Nikki described it as me goingÂ full VanDerWerffÂ to the degree that she was maybe a little bit worried about me and I think that’s probably an accurate summation of that story or whatever it was. I’d love to do it every day but I think the ability to do it every day would probably prove I was a crazy person. It turns out it’s a good thing that fit struck me when it did though because there literally wasn’t a single link today I thought was worth OTP so having an extra day’s worth of links in reserve is kind of a Godsend. Here’s what I did figure out from yesterday though. I don’t give a fuck about format anymore…again. I’ll probably get rigidly into it again at some point but for now I’d kinda rather write six links up that I really care about than 10 where I’m kinda meh. Here are six.

Soccer match-rigging, straight out of a Gibson novelHere’s a thing about markets that always strikes me as weird: if there are regular fluctuations in them and you can predict them then you can make effectively infiniteÂ amountsÂ of money. Sure predicting them is a lot harder in practice than it is in theory but at the same time one of the things we VALUE in markets is predictability. We want markets to be stable and logical and so rewarding people paying attention to that stability seems weird to me. Nowhere does that seem more obvious than in this sports betting example where we have a multi-million dollar industry effectively build off of those people that tweet Olympic results before they bother to air shit in the states. I’m not sure I can bring myself to be pissed off at Soccer as an institution for it though. That kinda seems like a Doctorow “fuck institutions” jam. Speaking of those.via Boing BoingÂ http://boingboing.netFebruary 20, 2013 at 07:00AM– – – – –

Constellation Games: debut sf novel floored me with its brillianceI am terrified to read this because I think the politics Cory Doctorow is so excited about will just piss me off. Yet the idea of reviewing the shitty boardgames of a collectivist alien armada is kinda too amazing to resist even if I worry it’s going to be unbearably preachy about how if one thinks about it life itself is just one big boardgame and we’d all be playing candyland than monopoly and if that is anything like the actual moral of this novel I’m probably going to go full VanDerWerrf for quite some time.via Boing BoingÂ http://boingboing.netFebruary 20, 2013 at 08:12AM– – – – –

Boiling Spacetime: How Time Works In The Graphic NovelI’ve never actually seen this explained quite so succintly but it’s pretty much exactly what I find interesting in all good comics. It’s also why almost all good comics make really shitty movies/tv shows/mini-series. Movies and Television have the power to expand and contract time but they can’t boil it the way comics do. They can’t simultaneously slow it down and speed it up and they can’t alter it while keeping the semiotic experience effectively constant. Comics storytelling breaks the second law of thermodynamics. Not literally because that’d be…actually nobody touch that that may be the next weird OTP short story I write but even just symbolically comics let you break storytelling rules that should be a constant and not enough people take advantage of it.via Warren EllisÂ http://www.warrenellis.comFebruary 20, 2013 at 10:00AM– – – – –

“You can hijack an offshore business in four easy steps, and then start to save money on your tax…”I really wish the law of imperfect mobilization of interest weren’t a thing because whenever I read about something like this I always think “I wish I could get 50,000,000 people to just do this with me and fuck up the US tax system so completely that they had to do something about it.” The way you can tell that I’m fundamentally not a great person is that all my fantasies about repairing our shared structures and organizations involve destroying them so completely that somebody else has to fix my problems for me. I sleep at night byÂ convincingÂ myself that’s actually a better protest strategy in the 21st century than what most people have come up with.via The New AestheticÂ http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/February 20, 2013 at 11:12AM– – – – –

Watch full-length movies on YouTubeThis is actually just an experiment to see if ANY of these are still working when you guys read this. My guess is that it isn’t and that that is the best summation of Reddit I can provide for anybody. “Wow, that is so simultaneously neat and ephemeral that it’s totally useless to anybody who isn’t regularly reading Reddit.”via kottke.orgÂ http://kottke.org/February 20, 2013 at 12:00PM– – – – –